I’ve always been interested in onomastics, the study of names.  Heck, it was on the short list of interests attached to my Livejour­nal account back in the day.  I’ve also always been interested in the study of generations; back in college I did my honors thesis on generational polemic.  And while there have been other sites that tracked the popularity of names, I don’t think any of them have looked into the generational specificity of names in precisely the way I’ve had in mind.  And I’ve had this project in mind for a long time—​twenty years or more.  Why finally get around to it now?

One reason is that I’ve been annoyed at some of the discourse surrounding names and generations that has sprung up in recent years.  From time to time I’ve thought about writing Calendar articles about these topics, but what always stopped me was that I didn’t want to find myself writing, “You know, one of these days I’m going to write a program to generate and analyze these graphs and then you’ll see how the data backs me up!”  One of the things that always irked me back in my days writing interactive fiction was when people would post, “Hey, everyone, I’m planning to write a game that does such and so!”  Like… cool, so do it.  Don’t write a post telling us about something you haven’t even started.

Another is that I kept running into generationally inappropriate names in books I read and movies I watched.  Like, you’ve set your story in 1947, and you throw in a character in his mid-30s named Jason?  Only 25 guys in the entire country born in 1911 were named Jason!  I’m sure Jason sounds like a perfectly good name to you, script writer, but that’s because you were born in 1970 and when you were growing up you had five Jasons in every class!  Long-running serials like superhero comics are a special case: writers create characters and give them generationally appropri­ate names, but time goes by and the characters don’t age much, while their names do.  For instance, the Marvel superheroines of the 1960s who were in their late teens and early twenties when they debuted are now depicted as though they’re in their mid-thirties; the idea is that sixty years of real time add up to about fifteen years of story time.  Let’s look at how some of these char­acters’ names ranked in what I hypothesize to be their original birth years versus how they rank in what their birth years seem to be today:

	Name	Original birth year	Rank	Current birth year	Rank
	Carol	1939	#6	1988	#333
	Susan	1940	#36	1986	#118
	Janet	1945	#21	1987	#204
	Jean	1947	#97	1994	#981

As we can see, all of these names had fallen out of favor by the time Millennial babies were being born (and they’ve fallen still further since then).  To match their names’ original ranks, their current names would have to be updated to Brittany Danvers, Andrea Storm, Kimberly Van Dyne, and Sabrina Grey.  And if they were being created in 2023 at their original ages, the correspon­ding names would be Taylor, Katie, Lauren, and Molly.  Carol, Susan, Janet, and Jean could be the names of their grandmothers.

So, yeah, I hope this can be a useful resource for writers trying to decide on character names: enter your options, look at the graphs, see what’s plausible.  But speaking of writing, that brings us to the main reason I finally got around to making this now.  I have long found that I make the most progress on a project when I have a more important project I should be working on instead.

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